The Chemical Detective
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The trouble with Semtex is the smell. Dogs can sense it. Most humans can’t. Boris could. Not the plastic explosive itself, you understand; neither RDX nor PETN◦– the main components◦– have much of an odour. The scent comes from the tracers added, to make sure it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. Hands like his. Chemist’s hands. Wide hands with long fingers, calloused from handling hot glassware, thickets of black hair curling over the knuckles, little copses between the joints. Hands now gripping the steering wheel of a five-axled articulated lorry hurtling towards the Zagrovyl factory in Teesside.
Boris only carried a small amount of Semtex these days, just enough for his own personal use. He kept it in a Tupperware container, wrapped in cling film, under his sandwiches. Sentimental value, really. He’d moved on. To some it might look like a backward step, from laboratory shift work to long-distance lorry driving. But only to those who didn’t know the tedium of analytical testing. The same samples, the same tests, the same results, hour after hour after hour. Not like the old days, when you had thorny problems to solve and real fires to fight. Nothing more boring than a well-run factory. He was glad when they sacked him. Glad to be free of the monotony. Glad to be out on the road. These days, his insight into tracers was a key skill for the job.